Well, the “problem” is, that our Education team is currently more a team of technical specialists and many work is done behind the scenes without communication to “the outside”. So even if you did not hear from us for some weeks, we are still alive and coding!

Here are just a few examples, that are going on behind the scenes:

• Translation of the new openSUSE Education Portal is work in progress. Many thanks to our contributors Guillaume for the Français, Freek de Kruijf for the Nederlands, Sabarth for the Português, Gankov for the Русский (Russian) Portal translation!
• Kirill is currently reviewing all 425(!) packages in the Build Service Education project and submitting them to openSUSE Factory afterwards – so openSUSE 12.1 will come with a huge set of packages directly inside the official repository.
• Cyberorg is working on the next release of the openSUSE Edu Li-f-e DVD with the LTSP integration.
• Anubusg1 and many others (the project currently lists 44 maintainers) are doing the “normal” packaging stuff like upgrading and fixing packages for 12.1 (aka Factory)

The Desktop4Education project from Austria was again present at the Conference and gave a great overview of the current status of the project during their talk. Good to hear that the project is being frequently used as a reference case by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture and as such promoted by them throughout Austria.

Talking with Andre Massing from the Simula Research Laboratory during his talk at the conference was quite interesting. Looks like the Science project might see some very interesting new packages in the next months. During the discussion, we agree that the Education and the Science project can share a lot of efforts in their project setups and organization. But they will stay separated (at least in the Build Service) as their audience is very different, even if they share some packages (which is currently done via links inside the Build Service).

The brave openSUSE wiki team stepped up to change that. The decision is to set up a new wiki with a well selected set of extensions and now the content of the old wiki is going to be transfered to the new wiki. Of course there will be a rigorous quality check of the articles, as well as a new thought through structure. The goal of this huge amount of work is to provide a outstanding good and well consumable source of information for all people in and interested in the openSUSE project. That is a high goal and I admire the energy and dedication of the wiki team.

The new wiki is now in place. So if you also want to help, either with the motivation of a developer telling how things work, or from the upstream perspective using the openSUSE vehicle to push the project or simply because you want to help openSUSE to become even better, first read the Transition Guidelines and subscribe on the wiki mailinglist, since most of the coordination happens there.
There is also a Forum Thread going on around that.

Please help to make this a success – thanks

There is a very cool thing that helps here, I saw it on Christian Hüllers screen recently: woas or Wiki on a Stick. This is a single (not simple html file that you open in your browser and it comes up as client side wiki that allows to edit documentation offline in wiki syntax with a browser based editor etc.

The nice thing is that the result is still one file. It is not really nice because of tons of styles and javascript functions in it, but it is just one non binary. That allows to check it into a source controll system and the problem “Maintaining the docs in Wiki or at the source” is a bit easier to decide now. Nice.